


Absolution

by wearitcounts (Sher_locked_up)



Series: Gratitude [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Angst, First Kiss, M/M, Post-Reichenbach, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-10
Updated: 2013-08-10
Packaged: 2017-12-22 23:48:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/919481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sher_locked_up/pseuds/wearitcounts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock can predict the outcome of a great number of things in this world; most things, in fact. It’s just deduction, in reverse. </p><p>He cannot predict John Watson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Absolution

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Polski available: [Rozgrzeszenie](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2077365) by [Ciri666](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ciri666/pseuds/Ciri666)



“Let me explain.”

Sherlock’s standing in John’s living room, in John’s new flat. He looks frail yet overlarge; his shoulders are hunched under the weight of the low ceiling, and his greatcoat seems to billow wider around his frame, closer to the floor than John remembers. It’s not the first time John’s seen him, but it’s the first time he’s _looked_.

“There is no,” John’s voice is shaking, and he pauses. He tightens his throat in an effort to hold it steady. “ _No_ explanation for this.”

“John—”

“No, Sherlock! I don’t care! Don’t you understand that? Can’t you see that?” John’s breath is heaving now, it’s not shaking anymore, just moving hard and heavy through his lungs and out of his mouth and nose. “I said I don’t want to see you, and I meant it. If you really—if it really meant anything to you at all, what you did to me,” he breaks off, chokes a little. His eyes water. “You’d leave. You’d just go, Sherlock. Just go.”

Sherlock’s eyes shift quickly from side to side, calculating, assessing, likely pulling microdeductions from the lines around John’s eyes, or the button that’s all but fallen off of his burgundy cardigan. “If you would just listen—”

“Listen? _You_ would like for _me_ to _listen_?” John barks out a laugh, high and bitter, moves into Sherlock’s space, presses a finger against his chest, refuses to acknowledge how much farther the bones protrude than the last time he touched Sherlock, the time when Sherlock was dead. “Do you know how many times I tried to talk to you? Do you know how often I texted a number that didn’t exist, called out to a flatmate who wasn’t there? I rather think, Sherlock, that you deserve about as much of my attention as you gave me of yours. Not just then. Before as well. You barely acknowledged I existed on good days, unless a witness needed chatting up or a cabbie needed paying.”

“John—”

John holds up a hand. “No. I don’t think so. Do you?”

Sherlock stumbles back as though he's been hit in the gut and his breath stutters and he seems to somehow lose his intention, his fight. He shuts his eyes and John doesn't stop, not now that he's finally got Sherlock quiet and small. “Leave, Sherlock. You aren’t even here; not to me. To me, you’re still dead.”

Something breaks in Sherlock at that, John can see it in the way his features twitch minutely and then soften, the way he pulls in his bottom lip. He feels a sick pleasure at watching Sherlock fracture and dissolve in front of him as he pulls his coat tight around his body and turns away. John walks to his bedroom with an unsteady gait, a jarring pain stiffening his right leg in concert with the sound of Sherlock’s footsteps retreating.

John strips almost bare, just to his pants. He crawls into bed and pulls the duvet over his body, curls into the tightest ball he can manage and rocks, quelling down as best he can his urge to vomit.

 ** **  
**** *

 ** **  
**** Sherlock can predict the outcome of a great number of things in this world; most things, in fact. It’s just deduction, in reverse.

He cannot predict John Watson.

Oh, he can deduce John Watson. He can deduce John down to his smallest parts, the tiniest fragments of toast at the corner of John’s mouth or a snag in the toe of John’s left sock; he can tell where John has been and what John has done.

Not one of those deductions informs any kind of pattern to predict John Watson’s behavior. Never has.

Which is why it takes Sherlock utterly by surprise when John Watson storms up the stairs and through the doorway of 221B Baker Street the following evening, eyes burning hot and wet, mouth in a shape Sherlock can’t ever remember seeing on John’s face, all bared teeth and wild fury and palpable, throbbing pain, throwing his fists and knees and hips bodily at Sherlock with all the force of the soldier he still is.

They fall to the living room floor in an ungraceful heap and Sherlock knows he’s going to feel it for days.

“You absolute tosser,” John growls, punctuating each word with blow, “you _utter_ waste of breath, you _complete fucking arsehole_!” He doesn’t stop there. He yells things that don’t make sense, words Sherlock’s sure he’s never heard, combinations that, in another scenario, Sherlock might applaud as improvement in John’s authorial skill. Sherlock doesn’t shield or defend himself; he leans into it, lets John’s limbs strike him all over, tastes blood on his upper lip and the inside of his cheek.

John’s breathing too hard to speak anymore so instead he’s just panting, panting and hitting and then grabbing Sherlock’s wrists and pinning them above Sherlock’s head and he’s not sure when it happened but John’s straddling him, knees on either side of his hips, and that’s when John’s face crashes against his own and it hurts, there’s blood all over his face and _goddamn_ it hurts as John bites his lips and pushes his tongue into Sherlock’s mouth and Sherlock just takes it, jaw slack, eyes shut. Then John whimpers and his whole body relaxes, just gives out, and his hands loosen and fall away. His lips are still against Sherlock’s, so Sherlock winds his arms around John’s back and uses his mouth to suck softly on John’s tongue, briefly, just a little, and then John pulls away.

“John,” he says.

John heaves himself up, moves off Sherlock and stands. Sherlock stays on the ground, only props up on his elbows, studies John. He doesn’t look angry anymore; he looks lost. He looks as though he’s misplaced something terribly important that he knows he can never retrieve. His clothes are rumpled and there’s heavy stubble on his jaw. There’s a smear of Sherlock’s blood on John’s lower lip that sends a jolt of something dark and filthy to Sherlock’s groin and he shifts his hips. He’s half-hard and even he knows that’s more than a bit not good.

“I can’t,” John replies. “Not now.”

“When can you?” Sherlock’s eyes are steady on John’s. “I’ll wait.”

John’s laughing now, so much his shoulders are shaking with it, but it’s a hollow laugh, devoid of any actual mirth. “Yeah, patient, you are.”

Sherlock doesn’t respond.

“I’m going to leave now,” John says, and as he does, stops and puts a hand on the doorframe. “We’re not finished.” It falls someplace between a threat and a promise and Sherlock is grateful for it, he’s so damned grateful his throat swells and he can’t say a word in return before John is gone, and then it all just feels more like something that happened to someone else.

 ** **  
**** *

 ** **  
**** Coffee was the original plan, but then John’s shift runs over and Sherlock has to pick up samples from the morgue and by the time they can meet up it’s after eight and so John suggests a pint. They don’t sit at the bar. They take a corner table in the back near a forlorn dartboard covered in months’ worth of dust with a single finger track running around the bullseye in the shape of a heart. _Eloquent_ paints itself across John’s consciousness and he’s startled at how easy it is to think about now that none of it is true.

It’s unfair, he knows it should be harder, that he should make it more difficult, but it just keeps coming around in circles in his head, and he’s hit Sherlock and made him bleed and he’s kissed Sherlock and tasted the blood he drew and it has to end somewhere. He briefly wonders if he’s going to hurt Sherlock worse than Sherlock hurt him, but that seems nigh impossible. This is Sherlock, and Sherlock doesn’t feel things that way.

Their glasses are leaving little interlocking rings of moisture on the table and Sherlock runs one forefinger through the wet mess in front of him, smudging and twirling the water into new patterns and shapes and puddles. His gaze is the heaviest thing John’s felt since the grief.

“The thing is,” John starts, and clears his throat. “Well, the thing is, I’m getting married.”

 ** **  
**** *

 ** **  
**** Sherlock knows what it feels like to be hit, to be really socked, right in the tender spots. He knows in a detached way that most of the time he deserves it. He knows John Watson throws a stronger punch than most, and he’s been on the receiving end of it on two occasions, and come out the worse. But the body is just transport and all things considered, John has never hurt him.

Even when John screamed at him, even when John told him he might as well still be dead, even when John laughed that terrifying empty laugh, Sherlock knew he deserved it, all of it, that it was a means to an end.

This is not in aid of anything Sherlock can deduce and it hurts like a stab wound, and Sherlock would know, because he’s suffered six of them. Except a stab wound will heal in time and somehow that knowledge lessens the pain because it’s a thing to focus on so you can ground yourself. Sherlock is eminently aware that this is not a stab wound.

“I see,” he says. “Congratulations.”

“Yes.” John takes a quick, nervous drink. “And I’m fucking furious Sherlock, really I am. I’m angrier than I’ve ever been in my life, and I’ve watched people die for real.”

Sherlock still can’t really breathe too well so he lets John continue.

“But you’re my best friend, and I can’t do anything about it. I tried, but I can’t. I fucking—I fucking love you, all right, you stupid, _awful_ excuse for a human being, and I can’t just pretend you’re dead, and I can’t undo what’s done, and I don’t want to. But I’d like you to be my best man, because the sad fact of it is, I haven’t got a better one.” John delivers the end of his speech into his half-empty pint glass before taking another, bigger, angrier swig.

Sherlock’s got his breath back and he squints at John as he asks, “Does this mean you’ve forgiven me?”

“Christ, Sherlock!” John slams his glass back on the table and pulls down his face with one hand, twisting and warping his skin. “I just don’t know. When you—when you jumped, when you made me watch you jump, I knew I’d never forgive you. And that was okay, Sherlock, really it was all right with me, because you were dead and I’ve seen enough of that to know the dead don’t need absolution. That anger was mine to do with what I liked, and I rather wanted to keep it, because it was literally all I had left of you. Do you understand that? Can you? _Nobody_ believed in you, Sherlock, nobody. The only way to keep myself from doubting was to be angry at you for giving up. And here you are, you never gave up at all, you didn’t have to and you didn’t have to fight either, not really. Not like I did.” John stops talking, and Sherlock can see he has more to say, but he’s not going to say it, not yet.

“I did fight for you, John,” Sherlock says, but then John lets out with that high, broken laugh again and he thinks better of it. Sherlock grips his pint with both hands, palms flush against the cold wet glass, tries again. “What happened—” he starts, and chokes a bit on the words. He can’t bring himself to say _my flat_ , but it’s not their flat either, not without John’s chair and John’s kettle and John padding around in his track pants and striped sweater, soft and pink and tousled from sleep. "What happened at the flat—"

“Don’t,” John cautions.

Sherlock falters. “I’m not going to—I just want,” he struggles, and before, this would be the moment John lets it go, tells Sherlock he understands, tells Sherlock it's all right, but John’s not doing him any favours anymore, it might never be all right and still he’s got to get at least this one thing right on his own. “Of course I’m prepared to be present for you in any way you require.”

“Good,” John says, his tone marginally lighter, and Sherlock exhales with not just a little relief at the second “good.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Kelley](http://anotherwellkeptsecret.tumblr.com) has made [gorgeous, GORGEOUS art](http://anotherwellkeptsecret.tumblr.com/post/63954552251/for-wearitcounts-based-on-her-fic-absolution-i) for this fic. I can't even. Go look.


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